The article discusses the challenges of working with hybrid teams within the overarching programme ChallengingGender, with its interdisciplinary theme groups and its arena for joint reflection and theoretical development. Theintellectual exchange over concepts with heterogeneous meanings across hybrid themes may lead to manydebates and controversies over allegedly joint concepts and be experienced as time-consuming exercises that givemeagre results. The article analyses the interaction within hybrid themes and between themes on the arena. Theanticipated dynamics in the process of arena work required both flexibility and adaptability, and the work wasdeveloped in several stages. Two important steps were the outlining of core statements and core questions at theheart of each theme, and letting themes actively challenge the research questions of other themes. The articlestresses the importance of exposure to methodological and theoretical pluralism to create scientific developmentand intellectual excitement.

The mass-vaccination with Pandemrix was the most important preventive measure in Sweden during the A(H1N1) influenza pandemic of 2009–2010, and covered 60% of the population. From 2010, an increased incidence of the neurological disease narcolepsy was reported, and an association with Pandemrix was affirmed for more than 200 children and young adults. The parental experience of this side effect provided a starting point for a collectively shaped critical narrative to be acted out in public, but also personalized narratives of continual learning about the disease and its consequences. This didactic functionality resulted in active meaning-making practices about how to handle the aftermath—using dark humor, cognitive tricks, and making themselves and their children’s bodies both objects and subjects of knowledge. Using material from interviews with parents, this mixing of knowledge work and political work, and the potential for reflective consciousness, is discussed.

During the swine flu pandemic of 2009–2010, all Swedish citizens were recommended to be vaccinated with the influenza vaccine Pandemrix. However, a very serious and unexpected side effect emerged during the summer of 2010 and more than 200 children and young adults were diagnosed with narcolepsy after vaccination. Besides the tragic outcome for these children and their families, this adverse side effect also suggests future difficulties in obtaining trust in vaccination in case of emerging pandemics, and thus there is a growing need to find methods to understand the complexities of vaccination decision processes. This article explores written responses to a questionnaire from a Swedish folklife archive as an unconventional source for analysing vaccine decisions. The aim is to investigate how laypersons responded to and re-interpreted the message about the recommended vaccination in their answers. The answers show the confusion and the complex circumstances and influences in everyday life that people reflect on when making such important decisions. The issue of confusion is traced back to the initial communications about the vaccination intervention in which both autonomy and solidarity were expected from the population. Common narratives and stories about the media or ‘big pharma capitalism’ are entangled with private memories, accidental coincidences, and serendipitous associations. It is obvious that vaccination interventions that require compliance from large groups of people need to take into account the kind of personal experience narratives that are produced by the complex interplay of the factors described by the informants.